The dangerous ripple effects of ransomware attacks on patient safety
Our thought leadership blog provides valuable perspective on the dangerous domino-effect impacts of ransomware attacks on patient safety. Read more!
As a practicing emergency physician, I grapple with the access and security challenges faced by healthcare organizations every day. We all want to remove barriers to access for clinicians without compromising privacy or data security. But this can be difficult given healthcare’s highly interdependent, fragmented digital landscape. Despite the challenges, at Imprivata, we love working with healthcare systems to enable digital transformation, safely and securely. The stakes have never been higher, so we all need to understand the very real effects of cyberattacks on patient safety and quality of care.
Let’s examine some of the real-life impacts of cybersecurity breaches on the delivery of emergency care from an evidenced-based approach.
The impact of a ransomware attack on any organization can be crippling, creating significant disruption to operational productivity, efficiencies, and the bottom line. But when attacks hit healthcare – the most targeted industry due to its highly sensitive data – the result can be more than just financial … it can be life-threatening. And not only in the facility where the breach occurs. The attacks create dangerous ripple effects, as they jeopardize care delivery in nearby hospitals as well. Given the expansive depth and breadth of the risks at hand, the attacks should be treated as regional disasters.
The evidence of just how dangerous and harmful these attacks are to life and limb is laid out nicely in the ground-breaking study, “Ransomware Attack Associated with Disruptions at Adjacent Emergency Departments in the US,” by Dr. Christian Dameff, the co-director of the UC San Diego Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity, and his colleagues. This paper meticulously details the very real, dangerous, costly patient care and operational impacts reaching beyond an affected hospital to surrounding hospitals and the community.
Study findings highlight the significant disruption and diversion of emergency medical services placed on hospitals adjacent to the attacked facility, including the ability to deliver time-sensitive care, especially in the case of serious conditions, such as strokes. Focus is on pre-attack vs attack phase disruption at two emergency departments adjacent to a healthcare organization under a month-long ransomware attack. Study metrics underscore the many care delivery areas affected, including:
- Patient volume: +15%
- Ambulance arrivals: +35%
- Waiting room times: +48%
- Patients leaving waiting rooms without being seen: 128%
- Stroke code activations: +73%
The fact that a ransomware attack in one emergency department can affect how long patients in a nearby facility wait to be seen for diagnosis or treatment – or never get seen – is a tremendous danger. That’s especially alarming in the case of high acuity, life-threatening events such as a heart attack or stroke. Along with coordinated planning and response efforts, the issue calls attention to the pressing need for advanced identity and access management solutions to help prevent and mitigate breaches.
For more details on this revealing study,see the full report. To learn about Imprivata solutions purpose-built to protect sensitive data without hindering clinician access,visit our website.